There’s nothing like visiting a place in person to dispel years of school history book teaching, news media reports, and Hollywood movie stereotypes. No matter how hard I tried, I could not imagine Russia to be anything other than cold and dreary. That applied to its weather as well as its people. A lifetime of the above influences was responsible for that.
I grew up during the Cold War. It was pretty much indoctrinated in me, again by the above influences, that showing any interest in anything Russian – its people, its history, its architecture, anything – could get you branded a Communist and blacklisted from any number of future opportunities. Still, I had an underlying yet growing interest in this all but forbidden country. I came to consider ever traveling to Russia a far-off fantasy.
Meanwhile, I learned Russian words such as tovarishch (comrade), spasibo (thank you), gospodin/gospozha (mister/madam), from a Robert Heinlein book – The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, if memory serves. It wasn’t until after college that I was able to actually use a word of Russian that I learned from that book; Spasibo (Ϲпасибо). And that was in a Jewish deli.
Then in 1985, Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev instituted a policy of glasnost, or openness. And things slowly began to change. Later that same year, the movie White Nights came out. In the movie, there was a scene where Nikolai Rodchenko (played by Mikhail Baryshnikov) explains to his former girlfriend Galina Ivanova (Helen Mirren) what he had been up to the last few years while he was ‘free’. During the scene, a song sung by a controversial Russian artist plays on a boom box. To me, he sang with mad power, passion, and intensity. I think that scene is what planted the seed of my fascination with the spoken (and sung) Russian language. I looked for the artist’s name on the soundtrack but could not find it. I think the American version of the soundtrack omitted that song. Do you know the name of that song and the name of the artist that sang it? Though that movie, like many others, painted a bleak picture of life in the former Soviet Union, it made me want to visit even more.
A couple of years after that, our company hired about a half dozen people from the former Soviet Union. I ended up working with one lady from Ukraine. We became friends. She taught me some more Russian words and phrases. Soon we were greeting each other in Russian: “Good morning. How are you?” “I’m good (or bad or cold)”. “And you?” That was pretty much the extent of our exchanges, but I’m sure some of my co-workers were shocked when they heard us conversing in the language.
Had you told me back then that in 25 years I would travel to Russia, I absolutely would not have believed you. Yet here I am, this far-off fantasy now becoming a reality. Here I am, about to see with my own eyes what Russia is really like. Even if it is just two days in a small part of one city, in a massive country that stretches across nine (used to be eleven) time zones, here I am.
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